The final draft of the GOP tax plan transfers even more wealth to the 1%: now they get 83%

What’s the definition of “private jet” in the tax code? If you jump a (small) ditch does that time airborne qualify it using the General Lee loophole? Just call your automobile the Spruce Goose 2.0.

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Just a quibble on the side - don whine that the bill is over a thousand pages. The ACA is over 1000 too, and for good reason. Both bills address lots and lots of subjects and (should) address the law’s impact on hundreds of other laws.

If you could write the tax code on a post card, imagine how screwed we would be.

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But surely there’s a big business, against whom you’re competing, who will buy you out with a nice fat emolument and allow you to live out your life on the interest?

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“Trickle down” is branding. The intent of tax cuts for the wealthy is to hoover the average American workers’ hard earned dollars into the maws of the uberwealthy.

I have no room in my heart to forgive anyone who voted for 45. Old and/or poor people will die because of this tax bill.

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Here’s a helping of evil in the plan:

Fuck Rubio and Lee with a rusty pipe.

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I think your last sentence sums up why they keep trying this, it does work. It screws people, those people can be motivated to go vote for more “fixing”, and that fixing makes sure things are bad enough to get them to the polls and vote for more fixing.

As a side effect it also happens to screw over the economy.

Although as an alternative explanation they people that vote for it (in congress) benefit from it, so they don’t care what it does to the rest of the republicans (and natch, who cares about democrats?). I’m not actually sure if that is more or less cynical then the “more power!” explanation.

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That’s certainly what “corporatism” has morphed into in the U.S., but for the sake of accuracy in the original formulation corporate groups were not limited to private for-profit corporations but also other organised interest groups (e.g. trade unions, charitable foundations). Mussolini saw the state as the dominating partner in the merger, but in the late-stage capitalist America that’s been flipped around with the state being used as the well-compensated enforcer and guard labour for the crony corporations.

Let’s call this “Corporatism 2.0”.

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Oddly enough, this reminds me of something else I’ve stumbled across today.

FEMA-estimated primary counterforce targets for Soviet ICBMs in 1990. The resulting fall-out is indicated with the darkest considered as lethal to lesser fall-out yellow zones.

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While I agree that laws like this should be long and complicated, officially the GOP doesn’t. So I could be persuaded that calling them on that as one of many duplicitous claims may be appropriate, if it were done clearly.

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Part of the initial propaganda for the bill was that it would be a simplification of existing law.

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This isn’t even accounting for the individual mandate repeal which will kill Obamacare and cause insurance premiums to skyrocket. Unless you’re lucky enough to have private or employer health insurance.

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And Trump keeps saying how the economy is The Best Ever. So why do we need these tax cuts again?

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Remember grinning Republicans holding up those postcards? The ones that were like the 1040-EZ, except they forgot a bunch of really basic stuff?

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Hello? Her emails?

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Bush 2 didn’t really practice ‘trickle down’, in fact he out-spent the previous five presidents. Now, a lot of that was down to Iraq/Afghanistan, but it doesn’t explain everything, he significantly increased federal spending across the board on non military (or even military-adjacent) programs, including social security, medicaid, education programs, state government, subsidies, etc. I believe only one of his chief economic advisors was a supply-sider (the first, Glenn Hubbard), most were Keynesians of one sort or another (Greg Mankiw probably the most prominent). He did introduce a series of tax cuts (which Obama renewed), but they weren’t particularly radical, and tax cuts by themselves are not enough to label something as “trickle-down” imho, and they were only partially responsible for the poor economic growth under his administration. The president to spend the next most (since LBJ) was actually Reagan, so the notion that he embodied “trickle down” is also problematic. Supply-siders think that you need both, tax cuts and spending cuts, but this was never actually attempted as far as I can tell.

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I think part of the reason people are citing the length is that it was dropped with very little time for review. Again.

The ACA was debated for what, 2 years?

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It’s just like in the corporate world. Take over company. Strip assets and load up with debt. Suck out as much as possible in dividends and bonuses. Find another company.

In this case, they will have to find another country, but they probably haven’t thought that far ahead.

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HRC would not have staffed major national departments with hacks, done away with Net Neutrality, removed science funding, removed bank regulations, removed protections for the environment, labor, consumer proetections, reduced national monuments, remove a woman’s right to choose, appointed right wing fascists to Federal courts, promote religion above government, promote polluting fossil fuel industries at the expense of renewables… I can go on an on. trump has done all of these things and more at the expense of our national intitutions and our physical and economic health. Care to try again?

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Organizing is a good idea. Here in Poland medium and small enterprise owners formed Union of Employers and Entrepreneurs, which frequently leads discourse with government and helps avoid problems like this.

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